Essex: A Beach Getaway

After a snowy, cold winter (punctuated by Jordan’s 2nd birthday, an early February work trip to Denver for me, a weekend getaway to an indoor water park resort in Danvers MA, and a lot of library outings and cabin fever), we take Jordan to Plum Island on the North Shore, for a short beach vacation to mark the very beginning of spring. After my Saturday morning long run, we head out to Essex County, following Route 1 northward - Jane driving while I entertain Jordan in the back seat. On the outskirts of Newburyport, we stop at Leo’s House of Pizza to grab takeout so that we won’t have to leave our hotel for dinner. We get fantastic deal on an extremely Jordan-friendly dinner (a giant 4-topping pizza, spaghetti with veal cutlet, and a loaded steak sub for less than $40!). A few miles and minutes away, we arrive at the small hamlet of Newbury, MA, checking into our beachfront room at Blue Inn on the Beach for the next three nights. After getting settled in, we take a walk out on the sand; Jordan and Jane get accidentally soaked in the cold surf after we take some family photos. The skies are overcast but beautiful and dramatic as the sun falls to the west; after dinner and sunset, I stay up late to monitor NOAA’s aurora borealis reports, heading back out onto the beach to chase some nighttime photography. Alas, the northern lights never appear, but in between drifts of cloud and rain, I wind up taking some nice long-exposures of the shoreline, the stars in the night sky, the rapidly changing weather.

The morning following my late night on the beach, Jordan wakes us all up at his usual time, which means that we are able to watch the sunrise as a family from the comfort of our hotel room. I take some photos of Jordan enjoying the view and playing with his toy truck from home - all while lit by the warm rays of morning’s first light. After two breakfasts (Jordan munching on leftover pizza followed by the hotel breakfast basket delivered to our door), we head out to take a drive around Newburyport followed by a late morning visit and tour at the Wolf Hollow in Ipswich MA. It’s a bitterly cold and windy morning (feeling nothing at all like springtime), so our activities are quite limited to showing Jordan some sights from the car (the “baby airplanes” at nearby Plum Island Airport, and the “school bus family” at the bus depot in Newburyport). For nostalgia’s sake, we stop at the nearby trailhead to Old Town Hill (which Jane and I visited during our Christmas 2021 post-snow trip around Essex County), but it’s too cold for a real hike. Jordan stretches his legs in the parking lot for a few minutes before we proceed onward to Ipswich for our visit with the wolves.

After returning to our hotel at noon with a takeout seafood lunch from The Clam Box of Ipswich (and having had to backtrack to retrieve Jane’s dropped wallet in the parking lot), I spend most of rest of Sunday napping and lounging around the hotel. In the bright environment of our hotel room, Jordan skips his nap and Jane winds up taking him to visit the game arcade at Joe’s Playland in nearby Salisbury. We spend the night enjoying dinner from a nearby Indian restaurant (Jordan’s recent favorite cuisine) and watching TV. The following day is another quiet and rainy one - we bring Jordan, in his new blue raincoat, to a children’s play-space at the Itsy Bitsy Zone in Salisbury, where he spends most of the morning ignoring everything else (slides, bounce-house, and toys galore) to play obsessively with a tabletop train set.

On the last morning of our trip, we finally have some clear, sunny weather, albeit still quite cold. Before returning to Boston, we finally enter the nearby Parker River Wildlife Refuge on Plum Island, which Jane and I last visited over four years ago in January 2021. We take Jordan out along Hellcat Dike to a tower looking out over some of the refuge’s salt marshes and brackish pools, followed by a brief boardwalk over the dunes to the seashore. Jordan enjoys sitting with Mama on the beach and demolishing an entire blueberry muffin, followed by playing chicken again with the surf at the water’s edge. Back in the car, I drive us back home to Boston by late Tuesday morning.

Rhode Island: Providence by Train

Jane and I cap off Thanksgiving weekend with a two-night getaway to Providence, RI. We intentionally take the commuter rail to get a little public transit practice in before Jordan’s big December trip to California - as well as because the little man is on a trucks-and-trains tear right now, and it’ll be his first time riding a train bigger than the T. We book a hotel room on the edge of Providence’s Financial District, just a few blocks from the train station, and spend two days walking around the downtown area, eating the hotel breakfast multiple times each morning, getting some precious time in at the hotel fitness center (me) and savoring the availability of television and relaxed screentime rules (Jordan and Jane). On Sunday (our full day in town), we take a morning stroll up College Hill to walk around the Brown and RISD campuses, taking some pretty photos with the last of the fall’s foliage; after Jordan’s nap, we walk to the nearby Providence Place shopping mall, where we dine at the food court, and Jordan has fun riding an escalator for the first time, running up and down wheelchair ramps, and pretending to be a Paw Patrol helicopter while sitting in a push car. After each night’s early sunset (just after 4 PM), I take a stroll around downtown, trying my hand at nighttime cityscapes, and bringing home dinner from the nearby Maruichi Japanese Food & Deli. Then, it’s back to Boston on Monday morning - our little budding traveler enjoy every second of our frigid walk home from the comfort of his bundled-up stroller muff, with only his eyes and a little patch of his upper face showing (“It’s his expression square,” I tell Jane while imitating the latest tiny wrinkled eye or furrowed brow visible on Jordan).

Massachusetts: Heading Out, Heading In

As the autumn marches on and the calendar year draws to a close, as the nights grow longer and the days grow colder, I find myself (as usual) in a space of reflection and looking inward, even as my life outwardly expands and several of its threads weave toward something resembling climax and resolution. After a busy October filled with family time, a lot of traveling, and photography, things have settled out. The grandparents have gone home; the systole of the academic year has begun to relax into diastole; and several resolutions I made for the year seem to be culminating in the space of these few weeks. After a lot of introspection last year, I set into motion a series of life goals that had laid dormant for awhile. I took better care of my body, putting together a consistent fitness plan that saw me gearing up for my first half-marathon in over five years (since the 2019 BRF that I ran with co-fellows). I pursued my passions more fiercely, with support from Jane - traveling solo, exploring through photography, pursuing weeknight and weekend coursework in field naturalism, and devoting more energy to spiritual practice and creative writing. It’s been a year of blossoming, and regaining confidence that I’m carving out the lifeway that I want to live, and model for Jordan and others. I won’t say that it’s a finished piece; it never is. The questions still come regularly, even relentlessly — am I doing what I should? Is it enough? In my professional life? In my family life? I may never know the answers, but I will keep trusting myself to look and ask and adjust. After all, there’s never enough time. And yet, there’s still time. And how much less beautiful and precious it would all be, if we always had enough.

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October 31, 2024: Jordan’s second Halloween. We dress up as the mom and dad from My Neighbour Totoro (Jordan is, obviously, Totoro) and pick the man up early from daycare to go trick-or-treating on nearby Toxteth Street. Jordan enjoys socializing with a giant animatronic skeleton, and running up porches to take candy (once in awhile managing to say “peese” and “tank you”).

November 2, 2024: A day out with Mass Audubon’s Field Naturalist Certificate Program, at the Blue Hills Reservation in Milton, MA. Our class spends the morning looking for animal sign on the shore and in the woods surrounding Houghton's Pond, and in the afternoon visit the top of the Great Blue Hill to hear learn about the weather observatory at the summit and view the surrounding watersheds from the highest point within ten miles of the Atlantic coast south of Maine. Helicopters go buzzing by, fighting nearby brushfires throughout Norfolk County. The afternoon ends with a freshwater habitat survey exercise (catching tadpoles and invertebrates!) beside the pond near the Blue Hills Trailside Museum.

November 10, 2024: The 2024 Boston Half-Marathon, my first distance race in over five years. Despite the intervening years of pandemic, parenthood, and generalized aging, I have had a lot of fun getting back into running this year, and hope to continue the fitness kick into next year. It’s not my fastest half-marathon (that was the 2013 BRF, by about seven minutes), but it’s, by far, the most confident and prepared I have felt for the half-marathon distance. In large part, I had an enormous mental edge because over two-thirds of the course replicated my training routes along the Emerald Neckalce since this past spring - not dissimilar to the experience I had running through the BRF course through East Baltimore, Homewood, Mt. Vernon, and the Inner Harbor. I run a steady 10-11 min/mile pace, without any dehydration or muscle cramping. Notwithstanding some knee soreness and runner’s toe, and despite a ridiculously tough and hilly final four miles in Franklin Park, it’s the best I’ve ever felt closing out a race.

November 16, 2024: My penultimate Saturday out with the Field Naturalist Certificate Program. I spend the day exploring along Boston’s waterfront, examining the effects of the king tide (spring tide coinciding with perihelion and perigee) on the coastline, and documenting the effects of anthropogenic climate change - as well as the ways that local communities are developing strategies to mitigate and resist its effects. After a fantastic day thinking about the coastal landscape from the lens of environmental justice, our class ends the afternoon at beautiful Belle Isle Marsh between East Boston and Revere.

November 23, 2024: A final Saturday spent with the Fall 2024 FNCP crew, reflecting on our time together at the Boston Nature Center and learning about dendrology at the Arnold Arboretum.